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IT buyers must demand open standards as balance of power shifts in their favour
Computer Weekly - The old cliché about open standards has never been truer - that the great thing about them is there are so many to choose from.
Look at the Wikipedia page
on the topic, for example. It lists 20 different definitions of what an
open standard is, and at least 30 different specifications all of which
claim to be a definitive open standard in their field.
Lack of standards leads only to single supplier dominance - the
effective standard for PCs for 25 years has been Windows, and for all
the benefits that has delivered, it still leaves many organisations
locked into Microsoft.
The same is happening in the cloud today - Amazon Web Services has become the dominant player
by building an ecosystem based on its technology and APIs. Azure and
Google are playing catch-up - but with no interoperability between
clouds. More than ever, users are demanding cloud standards to prevent a
repeat of the past.